Maxance Vincent
It’s a quiet week at the movies again before the storm of Christmas titles fills theatres for the Holidays as children are out of school. But it’s looking to be one of the quietest in years (barring the COVID Christmas of 2020 when most cinemas were shuttered around the world or operated at very limited capacity), with Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom set to underperform massively as the “biggest” Christmas movie tentpole of the season compared to the 2018 original billion-dollar success.
Thankfully for Warner Bros, the studio will have a family film in Wonka and a MAJOR awards season contender in The Color Purple to compensate for the losses Aquaman will likely give. While reviews for The Color Purple aren’t currently out, the social media buzz has been incredibly strong since it first screened, and the film has been nominated for several awards, including at the Golden Globes and the Critics Choice Awards, with the latter organization giving the movie a Best Picture nomination. Time will tell to see how it will perform at the Oscars, but it’s certainly the biggest contender to watch as it will make its big screen debut.
On the Wonka side of things, Timothée Chalamet received a Golden Globe nomination for his turn as Willy Wonka, while Calah Lane was nominated at the Critics Choice Awards in the Best Young Actor/Actress category for her role as Noodle. This likely helped boost some of the commercial sales in the movie, alongside decent critical buzz, with a $39 million tally, and it will most certainly leg out during Christmas, as families are looking for perfect entertainment at this time of year. Illumination’s Migration will likely not perform very well, but Timothée Chalamet’s stardom and Paul King‘s stamp as a family entertainer since helming the Paddington films will most certainly draw audiences this season. Plus, who doesn’t like going to the cinema and craving some chocolate after? That’s what the movies are all about!
Meanwhile, Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Poor Things is gaining some momentum as it expands into more theatres. In only 82 venues, the film managed to snag an impressive $1.2 million, with the film fully expanding to more areas on the 22nd, already making it one of the highest-grossing platform releases of the year and likely one of the Awards season’s most profitable films for 2023. The buzz has been incredible since its Venice premiere, and now that it is finally out in cinemas, audiences aren’t missing out on the opportunity to check it out for themselves.
While I won’t be around next week for a box office report (though there still will be a short report), I am still closely looking at the battle between Prabhas and Shah Rukh Khan at the domestic box office during Christmas, which may give Aquaman a run for its money in how it will leg out in the holiday season. Showings for Dunki and Salaar: Part One – Ceasefire have already sold out in my area, while Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is having difficulty filling 50% of the large IMAX auditorium on opening night. That’s not a good sign for DC, whose brand has been weakened more than ever before James Gunn got to do anything, but the Prabhas/SRK programming may lead to two Indian films cracking the domestic top ten during Christmas, which hasn’t happened quite often, perhaps ever. With Animal still holding out strong at the eleventh spot and Dunki potentially breaking SRK’s previous box office records established last September with Jawan, Indian cinema is in a relatively healthy place in North America, while Hollywood is still recovering from the pandemic and the strikes.
Here is the full list of the ten highest-grossing films of the weekend:
- Wonka (Warner Bros): $39M – 4,203 theatres
- The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (Lionsgate): $5.8M (-37.6%) – 3,291 theatres
- The Boy and the Heron (GKIDS): $5.1M (-60.2%) – 2,325 theatres
- Godzilla Minus One (Toho): $4.8M (-43.2%) – 2,622 theatres
- Trolls Band Together (Universal): $4.0M (-34.3%) – 3,157 theatres
- Wish (Disney): $3.2M (-39.7%) – 3,100 theatres
- Napoleon (Sony/Apple TV+): $2.2M (-45.9%) – 2,601 theatres
- Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé (Parkwood Entertainment): $2.0M (-63.5%) – 1,723 theatres
- Poor Things (Disney): $1.2M (+92.8%) – 82 theatres
- The Shift (Angel Studios): $1.0M (-52.1%) – 1,583 theatres
Source: Box Office Mojo
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